Differentiated services
computer networking architecture for classifying traffic and applying different routing policies to each classification of traffic
Differentiated services or DiffServ is a computer networking architecture that specifies a mechanism for classifying and managing network traffic and providing quality of service (QoS) on modern IP networks. DiffServ can, for example, be used to provide low latency to critical network traffic such as voice or streaming media while providing best-effort service to non-critical services such as web traffic or file transfers.
DiffServ uses a 6-bit differentiated services code point (DSCP) in the 6-bit differentiated services field (DS field) in the IP header for packet classification purposes. The DS field, together with the ECN field, replaces the outdated IPv4 TOS field.
Background
Modern data networks carry many different types of services, including voice, video, streaming music, web pages and email. Many of the proposed QoS mechanisms that allowed these services to co-exist were both complex and failed to scale to meet the demands of the public Internet. In December 1998, the IETF replaced the TOS and IP precedence fields in the IPv4 header with the DS field, which was later split to refer to only the top 6 bits with the ECN field in the bottom two bits. In the IPv6 header the DS field is part of the Traffic Class field where it occupies the 6 most significant bits.
In the DS field, a range of eight values (class selectors) is used for backward compatibility with the former IPv4 IP precedence field. Today, DiffServ has largely supplanted TOS and other layer-3 QoS mechanisms, such as integrated services (IntServ), as the primary architecture routers use to provide QoS.
Traffic management mechanisms
DiffServ is a coarse-grained, class-based mechanism for traffic management.
“Differentiated services” enters the record as computer networking architecture for classifying traffic and applying different routing policies to each classification of traffic. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Differentiated, services and computer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Differentiated services” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.